Sunday, June 26, 2016

Why we need to disentangle the concepts of city and state in the ancient world

Many
people will be puzzled by this title. The city and the state are separate
concepts that refer to very different things. Why would they need to be
"disentangled"? But in my own home discipline—anthropological
archaeology—these two concepts have long been wrapped up together in a single
package. A long-standing goal of anthropological archaeology has been to figure
out the origins of early cities and states. But when cities and states are not
distinguished, that goal has been impossible to reach. Now evidence is
accumulating that archaeologists can't ignore, and it is time to give up the
old view once and for all.

Fig. 1: Old archaeological view of state and city origins

Figure
1 shows the standard model for state origins in anthropological archaeology. Various
factors led to the establishment of the earliest states (archaeologists have argued
a lot about the relative importance of those factors). Once states came into
being, cites came along too, for the ride. Archaeologists didn't think that
urbanization required a separate theory. About fifteen years ago I started
focusing my comparative attention on cities and urbanization. I quickly
realized that while these old views were inadequate, they were deeply
engrained. I recall not long ago emailing an Egyptologist with a question about
early cities in Egypt (I forget now just what I asked). This person's response
was, "I can't help you, because I haven't worked on state origins for many
years." Say, what? I hadn't asked anything about states, I had asked about
cities.

I
think one reason archaeologists were slow to separate states and cities, was
because most cities in the ancient world were dominated by politics, and not by
economics. Today, cities are all about economics: factories, production, trade,
commerce, firms, and employment. Political processes play a decidedly secondary
role for most urban issues. But in the deep past, on the other hand, most
cities were all about politics. They were capitals where kings lived, or state
outposts where bureaucrats operated. Economic activity took a back seat to
political activity in generating urban growth and shaping the nature of cities
(Jose Lobo and I develop this theme in a paper now under review, "Cities through
the Ages: One Thing or Many?"). Since cities were essentially political
institutions, it seemed natural to link urbanization to state formation.

Figure 2. State traits and urban traits, from Chick (1997:294)

Nevertheless,
cities and states are quite different, whether we are talking about
nation-states today or the early states and empires. Figure 2 shows one small
piece of evidence supporting this idea. This table, from an article by Garry
Chick (1997), shows the results of a factor analysis of a cross-cultural sample
of human societies. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample is a collection of human
societies described by anthropologists that can be analyzed statistically (see
Ember and Ember 2009). In this study, Garry Chick examined how a number of
social variables were associated in the sample. He identified two factors, or
principal components. Factor 1 has high loadings for variables related to
administration and economics (red box). This shows that these traits are
strongly correlated; they come as a package in some societies. Societies either
tend to have writing, money, and social stratification, or else they tend to
lack these things. These are state-related variables. A second set of variables
scored high on Factor 2: these are urban-related features (residence patterns,
density, urbanization, and agriculture). The interesting thing is that principal
components defines factors that are independent of one another
("orthogonal" is the technical term). That is, knowing the score of a
society on Factor 1 will not help you predict its score on Factor 2. In other
words, urban features are basically independent of state features when a wide
range of human societies is considered.

A
recent book by Justin Jennings, called Killing
Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and its Consequences
provides more evidence for the need to separate cities and states in the
distant past. This is a fantastic book, and I will blog about it in more depth
before long. For now, I want to emphasize one particular strand of Jennings's
argument. He proposes two reasons why archaeologists and anthropologists should
abandon the concept "civilization." First, the concept "helped
justify colonial and racist projects of the 19th and early 20th
centuries" (p. 266). If some societies are "civilizations" and
others are not, this implies some peoples are civilized and others are not. But
this is more of an evaluation, a value judgment that has often justified racism,
and less of an analytical term. Therefore scholars should give up the concept of
civilization. I agree.

Second,
the idea of civilization—as in "the rise of civilization"—confuses state
formation and urbanization by implying that they are both parts of a single
package that came into being all at once. Much of Jennings's book is devoted to
examples of early urban settlements that developed prior to state organization.
If urbanization preceded state formation, then these two processes must be
disentangled if we are to make any sense at all of early developments. I REALLY
agree!

This
last point gets into the broader and very important issue of how urbanization generates changes in
society, and how the results of living together in dense settlements may have
led to early state formation. This is a theme I have been working on recently;
see some of my prior blog posts (such as Cities as social reactors, or Settlement scaling and social science theory). I have
some papers in press and under review on this topic. But this kind of new
approach only makes sense when archaeologists have actually disentangled
processes of urbanization and state formation. From the point of view of
comparative social-science research on cities, this is a no-brainer. But
some archaeologists still need to wake up to urban reality, and Justin Jennings's
book is a big step in the right direction.

Chick, Garry

1997Cultural
Complexity: The Concept and its Measurement. Cross-Cultural Research 31:
275-307.

About Me

I am an archaeologist who works on Aztec sites and Teotihuacan.I do comparative and transdisciplinary research on cities, and also households, empires, and city-states. I view my discipline, archaeology, as a Comparative Historical Social Science.
My home pageMy papers to downloadMy page on Academia.edu
Twitter: @MichaelESmith
I am Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University; Affiliated Faculty in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning; Fellow, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; Core Faculty in the Center for Social Dynamics Complexity. Also, I have an affiliation with the Colegio Mexiquense in Toluca, Mexico.